The Nature of Fragile Things
April 18, 1906: A massive earthquake rocks San Francisco just before daybreak, igniting a devouring inferno. Lives are lost, lives are shattered, but some rise from the ashes forever changed. Sophie Whalen is a young Irish immigrant so desperate to get out of a New York tenement that she answers a mail-order bride ad and agrees to marry a man she k...show more
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Community Reviews
The Nature of Fragile Things opens with the transcript of Sophie Whalen Hocking being interviewed by Ambrose Logan, a U.S. Marshall, on November 6, 1906. At the outset, Meissner reveals that Sophie married Martin Hocking on March 10, 1905, and reported him missing six weeks after the catastrophic April 18, 1906, San Francisco earthquake. From there, the story is related via Sophie's first-person narrative, which is interrupted occasionally by add...read more
Loved this book! The author did a fantastic job laying out the story yet keeping you guessing about certain things. Character development was great.
COMPELLING STORY. The kind of book that keeps you wondering about what is going to happen. Maybe a bit too much foreshadowing that made me think "yeah, that's what I thought happened in her past."
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